Thus you will acquire the kind of sense of life that produced the encyclical “Populorum Progressio.” It was not produced by the sense of life of any one person, but by the sense of life of an institution.
The dominant chord of the encyclical’s sense of life is hatred for man’s mind—hence hatred for man—hence hatred for life and for this earth—hence hatred for man’s enjoyment of his life on earth—and hence, as a last and least consequence, hatred for the only social system that makes all these values possible in practice: capitalism.
I could maintain this on the grounds of a single example. Consider the proposal to condemn Americans to a lifetime of unrewarded drudgery at forced labor, making them work as hard as they do or harder, with nothing to gain but the
barest subsistence—while savages collect the products of their effort. When you hear a proposal of this sort, what image leaps into your mind? What / see is the young people who start out in life with self-confident eagerness, who work their way through school, their eyes fixed on their future with a joyous, uncomplaining dedication—and what meaning a new coat, a new rug, an old car bought second-hand, or a ticket to the movies has in their lives, as the fuel of their courage. Anyone who evades that image while he plans to dispose of “the fruit of the labors of people” and declares that human effort is not a sufficient reason for a man to keep his own product—may claim any motive but love of humanity.
I could rest my case on this alone, but I shan’t. The encyclical offers more than a sense of life: it contains specific, conscious, philosophical corroboration.
Observe that it is not aimed at destroying man’s mind, but at a slower, more agonizing equivalent: at enslaving it.
The key to understanding the encyclical’s social theories is contained in a statement of John Gait: “I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.” (Atlas Shrugged)
The encyclical neither denies nor acknowledges the existence of human intelligence: it merely treats it as an inconsequential human attribute requiring no consideration. The main, and virtually only, reference to the role of intelligence in man’s existence reads as follows: “The introduction of industry is a necessity for economic growth and human progress; it is also a sign of development and contributes to it By persistent work and use of his intelligence, man gradually wrests nature’s secrets from her and finds a better application for her riches. As his self-mastery increases, he develops a taste for research and discovery, an ability to take a calculated risk, boldness in enterprises, generosity in what he does and a sense of responsibility.” (25)
Observe that the creative power of man’s mind (of his basic means of survival, of the faculty that distinguishes him from animals) is described as an acquired “taste”—like a taste for olives or for ladies’ fashions. Observe that even this paltry acknowledgment is not allowed to stand by itself: lest “research and discovery” be taken as a value, they are enmeshed in such irrelevancies as “generosity.”
The same pattern is repeated in discussing the subject of work. The encyclical warns that “it [work] can sometimes be given exaggerated significance,” but admits that work is a creative process, then adds that “when work is done in common, when hope, hardship, ambition and joy are shared . . . men find themselves to be brothers.” (27) And then: “Work, of course, can have contrary effects, for it promises money, pleasure and power, invites some to selfishness, others to revolt…” (28)
This means that pleasure (the kind of pleasure which is earned by productive work) is evil—power (economic power, the kind earned by productive work) is evil—and money (the thing which the entire encyclical begs for passionately) is evil if kept in the hands of those who earned it.
Do you see John Gait doing work “in common,” sharing “hope, hardship, ambition and joy” with James Taggart, Wesley Mouch, and Dr. Floyd Ferris? But these are only fiction characters, you say? Okay. Do you see Pasteur? Do you see Columbus? Do you see Galileo—and what happened to him when he tried to share his “hope, hardship, ambition and joy” with the Catholic Church?
No, the encyclical does not deny the existence of men of genius; if it did, it would not have to plead so hard for global sharing. If all men were interchangeable, if degrees of ability were of no consequence, everyone would produce the same amount and there would be no benefits for anyone to derive from sharing. The encyclical assumes that the unnamed, unrecognized, unacknowledged fountainheads of wealth would somehow continue to function—and proceeds to set up conditions of existence which would make their functioning impossible.
Remember that intelligence is not an exclusive monopoly of genius; it is an attribute of all men, and the differences are only a matter of degree. If conditions of existence are destructive to genius, they are destructive to every man, each in proportion to his intelligence. If genius is penalized, so is the faculty of intelligence in every other man. There is only this difference: the average man does not possess the genius’s power of self-confident resistance, and will break much faster; he will give up his mind, in hopeless bewilderment, under the first touch of pressure.
There is no place for the mind in the world proposed by the encyclical, and no place for man. The entities populating it are insentient robots geared to perform prescribed tasks in a gigantic tribal machine, robots deprived of choice, judgment, values, convictions and self-esteem—above all, of self-esteem.
“You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his.” (23) Does ■ the wealth created by Thomas A. Edison belong to the bushmen who did not create it? Does the paycheck you earned this week belong to the hippies next door who did not earn it? A man would not accept that notion; a robot would. A man would take pride in his achievement; it is the pride of achievement that has to be burned out of the robots of the future.
“For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself.” (23) “God intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of every human being and people.” (22) You are one of the things that the earth contains; are you, therefore, intended “for the use of every human being and people”? The encyclical’s answer is apparently “Yes”—since the world it proposes is based on that premise in every essential respect.
A man would not accept that premise. A man, such as John Gait, would say: “You have never discovered the industrial age—and you cling to the morality of the barbarian eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists. When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind.” (Atlas Shrugged)
But a robot would not say it A robot would be programmed not to question the source of wealth—and would never discover that the source of wealth is man’s mind.
On hearing such notions as “The whole of creation is for man” (22) and “The world is given to all” (23), a man would grasp that these are equivocations which evade the question of what is necessary to make use of natural resources. He would know that nothing is given to him, that the transformation of raw materials into human goods requires a process of thought and labor, which some men will perform and others will not—and that, in justice, no man can have a primary right to the goods created by the thought and labor of others. A robot would not protest; it would see no difference between itself and raw materials; it would take its own motions as the given.
A man who loves his work and knows what enormous virtue—what discipline of thought, of energy, of purpose, of devotion—it requires, would rebel at the prospect of letting it serve those who scorn it. And scorn for material production is splattered all over the encyclical. “Less well off peoples can never be sufficiently on their guard against this temptation, which comes to them from wealthy nations.” This temptation is “a way of acting that is principally aimed at the conquest of material prosperity.” (41) Advocating a “dialogue” between different civilizations for the purpose of founding “world solidarity,” the encyclical stresses that it must be: “A dialogue based on man and not on commodities or technical skills….” (73) Which means that technical skills are a negligible characteristic, that no virtue was needed to acquire them, that the ability to produce commodities deserves no acknowledgment and is not part of the concept “man.”